Il nuovo Spoon River: Testo inglese a fronte by Edgar Lee Masters

Il nuovo Spoon River: Testo inglese a fronte Reviews

• 
  Googoogjoob

  This is Edgar Lee Masters's attempt, a decade or so later, to recreate the format (and the success) of his only real masterpiece, the Spoon River Anthology. The idea of "more Spoon River" is inevitably alluring to anyone who's read and loved the Anthology, and here Masters tries to give the people what they want. He fails, and worse, doesn't quite seem to get what made the SRA work in the first place.
  
  Spoon River Anthology is a series of 246 poems, all but three of them in the form of brief monologues by the shades of the dead buried on a hill in the Illinois town of Spoon River. Few of the poems are noteworthy in their own right; rather, the effect and reputation of the work rest on the way the poems interact. They contradict each other, offer different perspectives on the same people, events, or ideas, they gossip. They give, generally, the impression of the life of a community over a century or so, from frontier town to late-19th century backwater.
  
  The New Spoon River attempts to replicate this format, and to serve as a continuation of SRA, bringing things up to date (meaning the early 1920s), and to depict Spoon River's transformation from a small town into a satellite of Chicago. It does not work, for several reasons.
  
  The biggest and most notable reason is that the poems simply no longer comment on each other in the same way they did in SRA. Masters identified 19 discrete narrative arcs embedded in the poems of SRA, where sequences of poems built up a composite story between them, and many poems that aren't part of these arcs also provide glancing commentary on the characters in them. TNSR doesn't even really try for many such arcs. There are only eight sequences like that in TNSR, and only the triptych of the Snivelys (Selden, Howard, and Ernest) goes any further than "a pair of poems commenting on each other" or "one poem commenting on another." Four poems early on comment on local big man Ezra Fink, but where the shadow of crooked banker Thomas Rhodes hangs over SRA, Ezra Fink is negligible, and not mentioned at all after the 24th poem.
  
  Perhaps this disconnection is meant to show that Spoon River has grown and diversified, and is no longer a tightly-knit small town- but that just goes to show that this format doesn't work as well when taken from that tight-knit original context. Insofar as this book uses the multiple-perspective technique, it mostly uses it to provide multiple perspectives on American society as a whole, rather than on individual characters and dramas- and it just doesn't work as well for that purpose. Where Masters could draw on real-life gossip and town lore for SRA (many poems treat real events with the names changed slightly), he can't do that here, further contributing to its feeling of atomization. His attempts at treating urban alienation and disillusionment, or the immigrant experience, are not as convincing as his depictions of wasted lives and stifled dreams in SRA.
  
  The collection's feeble interconnectedness is also overshadowed by Masters's clumsy attempts to link this book with the original SRA. By my count, there are 24 references by these poems to other poems in the book- spread out over 329 poems, that's an average of .07 references per poem. But there are 82 references to poems in Spoon River Anthology (not counting references to characters, like Burchard the saloon-keeper, without their own poems)- .25 per poem. (For comparison, SRA has 228, for a rate of .93 internal cross-references per poem.)
  
  The references to SRA characters in TNSR are usually clunky, and none of them really offer vital new information. Many of the references are offhand and superficial- eg the mention in "Percy Cowherd" of Roscoe Purkapile. In the poem "Maurice Schlichter," Masters embarrassingly bungles his reference- he mentions Eugene Carman, but the referred-to story (a man throwing himself on Rhodes's mercy) is clearly that of Clarence Fawcett, whose poem follows Carman's in SRA. A poem like "Hofflund the Cobbler," which gratuitously describes the feet of 12 characters from SRA in implicit contrast to their characters, could've passed muster as a lesser, but forgivable, entry in SRA. Here it sticks out awkwardly, and highlights just how little the poems in this volume relate to each other. "Leander Morphy" similarly rattles off a list of seven SRA characters before ending in (unintentionally?) hilarious bathos.
  
  Eight different poems in TNSR mention Lucius Atherton, a (rather pathetic) ladies' man from SRA (and one other character might be intended as his child, or at least named after him), making him, for whatever reason, the most-mentioned character in this book, other than Jesus (name-dropped 17 times total). The town-defining banker Thomas Rhodes only gets mentioned six times, while the spineless newspaper editor Whedon is mentioned five times, and cruel mayor A. D. Blood four.
  
  The sequencing of the poems also feels haphazard- in conjunction with the book's lack of interrelatedness, there are few related adjacent poems; the scarcity of married couples or parents and children in sequence means that the volume feels less like wandering through a small graveyard with family plots, and more like a random sampling of a huge cemetery.
  
  The poems are frankly not as good, generally, as in SRA, either. Masters resorts too often to Climactic final lines!, and it feels like he struggles to treat the more impersonal social/political forces of his increasingly urbanized setting with the depth he treated the small town Spoon River was. Even his selection of characters' names is weaker, lacking the poetry of SRA.
  
  There are too many poems. SRA originally had 213, expanded to 246; TNSR has 329 (some bundled into multi-character sequences). Unlike SRA, Masters doesn't try for a grand poetic gesture to close the volume- which is probably for the best, considering how "Epilogue" turned out. Unfortunately, though, he instead chooses to end the volume with "Cleanthus Trilling," a rather trite poem that echoes "Mrs. Sibley" from SRA, but without the pathos. ("Mrs. Sibley" features a series of lines in the format "The secret of...," eg "The secret of the seed—the germ," and climaxes with the suggestive imagery that her own secret is buried beneath a "mound." "Cleanthus Trilling" is a series of lines in the format "The urge of...," starting with "The urge of the seed: the germ," and ends with the bland "The urge of Pain: God.")
  
  So- this is not the worst volume of poems ever assembled. Some of them are pretty decent in isolation. The problem is that Masters deliberately set the book up as a continuation of Spoon River Anthology, and simply failed to live up to the standard he had set a decade earlier. It's not possible to judge it purely on its own merits- in its format, themes, and explicit content it constantly calls SRA to mind, and is found wanting.
  
  As a footnote: for some arcane reason, Goodreads lists this book, The New Spoon River, as an edition of a much later Italian volume, which apparently contains translations of both Spoon River Anthology and The New Spoon River. One has to assume that most of the ratings (which are on average very good) are the result of Italian readers evaluating the first book.
• 
  Roberta

  Partendo dal presupposto che questi nuovi poemi non arrivano alla magnificenza della classica Antologia di Spoon River, devo dire che è stata una lettura molto piacevole. Gli epitaffi sono più caustici e intrisi di politica e religione, rispecchiano benissimo il periodo in cui sono stati scritti. I personaggi sembrano più disperati dei precedenti, come se l'avanzare delle epoche li avesse induriti e spogliati da qualsiasi gioia. Ci sono tematiche interessanti celate da simboli e da un ottimo utilizzo del lessico. Ho apprezzato l'epitaffio sulla poligamia, la bisessualità e quelle sul sessismo intrise dal falso perbenismo.
• 
  Silvia

  3+
  
  Recensione completa qui:
  http://tinyfoxinthebox.blogspot.com/2...
  
  Pur non essendo un'amante dei classici, questo libro non mi è dispiaciuto.
  Una raccolta di epitaffi in chiave poetica molto interessante, che offre un discreto spaccato della vita di paese nel Midwest dell'epoca e che tratta diversi temi davvero importanti.
  Verso la metà, personalmente, ho cominciato a trovare il tutto un po' noioso e lento, ma comunque è stata una buona lettura.
• 
  Elisabetta

  Un'entrata inutile nel panorama creto da Masters che era l'immaginifica città di Spoon River. Il potenziale per approfondire, esaminare e vedere sotto nuova luce il progresso e la globalizzazzione, l'urbanizzazzione delle cittadine Americane, perso- svanito nella ripetitività, il oltre 300 pagine di abitanti di quello che è divenuto il sobborgo della grande città, dove le donne ingannano o rinunciano, arroganti, alla famiglia per la carriera, e gli uomini desiderano solo denaro e non avere Dio.
• 
  Tara

  This isn't as good as Master's first Spoon River works. This selection doesn't have the small town connections that make the anthology so fun to read. However, it does add to the first because several well known characters from the first selection are mentioned in this works, so it is a continuation of sorts.
• 
  MisterFweem

  Review is here, including my attempt at a modern Spoon Riveresque epitaph.
  
  
  http://www.misterfweem.blogspot.com/2...
• 
  Barbara Ab

  I understand the high level of poetry writing and the genius behind it, but I don’t appreciate anymore poetry in this stage of my life… I read no more of half of it…